With the help of Brock researcher Kiyoko Gotanda, a new paper is offering insight into the emerging field of urban evolutionary ecology.

The Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences was part of an interdisciplinary international team of researchers that recently completed a ‘horizon scan’ to determine the top 30 questions and research avenues in the field.

Gotanda and 28 other researchers, social scientists and academics published their paper Nov. 1 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Research on the evolutionary ecology of urban areas reveals how human-induced evolutionary changes affect biodiversity and essential ecosystem services.

Gotanda helped co-ordinate groups of authors for the section of the manuscript focused on “politics, governance, culture, their interactions and their ethical considerations.”

The researchers polled members of various groups who study or work in urban evolutionary ecology with the goal of identifying the emergent issues and research priorities that affect the ecology and evolution of species within cities.

“Horizon scans identify knowledge gaps and the next questions and steps to be taken for advancing the research field on that subject,” said Gotanda.

The scan is an opportunity for scientists in an emerging field to collaborate and choose research topics with the most benefit to the field as a whole.

“The questions were eye-opening for me,” said Gotanda. “If I hadn’t taken part in the horizon scan, I would have never thought about questions such as ‘can synthetic organisms adapt to urban environments?’ Imagine if artificial intelligence-driven machines like the Amazon delivery drones start adapting to their urban environment.”

The paper abstract is available online.

Below are the Top 3 ranked questions from the horizon scan.

• What is the magnitude of effect of social inequality and systemic oppression in driving ecological and evolutionary dynamics in cities, and how do we ethically and empirically quantify and test this?
• How do pathogens that cause human disease adapt to the urban environment and how does rewilding and restoration alter our ability to fight disease outbreaks?
• To what extent does variation among political systems and governance predict evolutionary responses to, and biodiversity of, urban environments?

To read all 30 questions, email Gotanda at kgotanda@brocku.ca